As Reid's votes on virulently anti-choice (and anti-labor, anti-environment) judges shows, it's better to have a Democrat than a Republican hold any seat in Congress. Better, that is, for those of us who care about the broad palette of progressive issues. That doesn't mean that NARAL is forced to support Casey. Neutrality is an option.

Why he thinks one senator's actions are proof of anything is a mystery, especially given all the Democrats who advocate TRAP laws. It's like he doesn't really care, but rather is trying to rationalize his Democrats-right-or-wrong worldview for those of us who fancy our constitutional rights and don't cotton to gang colors logic. Why he repeatedly harps on NARAL, who has marginal influence at best on Democratic Party politics these days -- especially when he likes to advocate for the "big tent" -- who knows?

Here's the news flash: pro-choice is the big tent.

It's the anti-choice folks that Kos and friends are pushing who are against the big tent. It is the anti-choice folks who say that everyone must obey their views. It's the anti-choice folks who push to criminalize women's reproductive rights. It's the anti-choice folks who are the intolerant ones.

But to hear Kos and others, you'd think that the anti-choice folks were just trundling along, just minding their own business, and we big meanie pro-choice folks with our "pet cause" and "litmus tests" are out to impose our will on everyone, when just the opposite is the case.

Pro-choice means tolerance for all views. Pro-choice means it's not the government's place to decide. The pro-choice tent is big, already including people who are anti-abortion. It's the anti-choice people who want to kick out the pro-choice folks -- not just out of the Party, but out of the very fabric of our society. The anti-choice people want the government to seize control of wombs and institute reproduction controls that violate the woman's body, and thus her very fundamental constitutional rights of equal protection under the law.

Let's be clear: When Kos and other self-proclaimed "Democrats" attack pro-choice folks, they are carrying water for the right wing, whether they mean to or not, and are undercutting the very foundation of progressive values that have been at the heart of Democrat politics for decades. This isn't about "pet causes" but about fundamental human rights, and to argue that the Democrats must make room for people who don't believe in fundamental human rights for all Americans, in the name of "big tent" politics, is self-contradictory and patently absurd.

The radicals pushing their dominionist agenda on America are bad enough. We don't need our rights to be attacked from so-called allies. Nor do we need our strongest advocates to be fragged right when the battle is turning against us. This is war, and the very fundamental human rights of women are at stake. Now is not the time to start offering up constituents as bargaining chips to gain territory.

Today marks the onset of hearings to fill the Supreme Court. As I write this, people are lined up to file into the Senate Russell Office Building to hear all the obligatory "thank yous" and self-inflation that mark such occasions. And then the games will begin.

And women's lives will be on the line.

We've already been given notice that the purportedly pro-choice committee chair will not go against his party and ask Judge John Roberts about Roe. Will the Democrats? And will they go beyond questions and actually back up their concerns with their vote?

We're accustomed to a lot of firm talk from Democrats lately. Sadly, we're also accustomed to a lot of knuckling under after the speechifying is over. Will this be any different?

Will it matter?

The perception in most circles is that the Supreme Court's Roe precedent is the front line to reproductive rights. The perception is that, until Roe is overturned -- which many expect will eventually happen, thanks to the dogmatic misogyny of Supreme Court ideologues and sympathetic characters -- women's reproductive rights are safe. The perception is that if and when Roe is overturned, that is when the battle begins.

But the war is already well underway. And battles are already being lost. The perceptions that the war has yet to start are wrong.

For years, the anti-abortion movement has pressed its case with noisy demonstrations that blocked clinics, with high-profile legislation that directly challenged the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, and in some cases with violence, including the assassination of physicians. But 28 years after Roe, with public support of abortion rights running high, the movement has adopted what might be called a stealth strategy: to chip away at abortion rights, slowly and discreetly, with low-profile legislation and lawsuits that stop short of trying to outlaw the procedure.

The new tactic is to bombard providers with a barrage of costly rules. In addition to the civil-liability law, Louisiana has tried to slap abortion providers with extra-stringent building codes that regulate everything from the width of hallways in clinics to the angles and jet types for drinking fountains. Abortion opponents want to create small, expensive obstacles that cumulatively make it harder for clinics to offer servicesâ€”or, in the words of one right-to-life leader, to create an environment "where abortion may indeed be perfectly legal, but no one can get one." Not only does the tactic have the benefit of generating little public attention, but it also allows anti-abortion activists to couch the issue in terms of a woman's welfareâ€”for example, the right of a patient to sue her physician for unlimited sums.

States all over are passing TRAP laws. Louisiana has had one since 2001. A US District Court just upheld a 1998 Ohio trap law.

The new law requires that at least one parent give his or her consent to
the abortion. Girls are still free to go to court to ask a judge for an
order to bypass that consent requirement, but the abuse defense can no
longer be used.

Texas passed a law allowing execution of doctors who abort a pregnancy.

These are not unique instances.

And now House Democrats -- DEMOCRATS! (who, by the way, dropped the ERA from their platform) -- are about to introduce HR 748, which, among other things, prevents anyone, even a parent, from transporting a minor across state lines to have an abortion. Forget parental rights. Forget legal guardianship. When it comes to breeding, this bill gives the state sovereignty over the womb.

All the courts involved

In fact, abortion opponents have found that the courts are as powerful a tool as the state legislatures. In the past few years, clinics and doctors have been hit with a spate of lawsuits claiming that women didn't give proper consent for an abortion or suffered psychological damage afterward. "A case will be brought against a provider that will most likely be thrown out," says Mueller of the National Abortion Federation. "However, the physician still has to go through a lengthy court battle, and endure costs and publicity throughout the case." Even the most far-fetched claims can hurt clinics. Anti-abortion lawyer John Kindley recently wrote a 21,000-word article in the Wisconsin Law Review suggesting that malpractice suits against abortion doctors "may serve an important role in raising public awareness" of the alleged abortion-breast cancer link. Kindley put that theory into practice in 1999, suing a Fargo, North Dakota, clinic for disputing the breast-cancer theory in a brochure. Even before the case has gone to trial, the Red River Women's Clinic has been forced to pay $5,000 in legal fees. "Part of their strategy is to drag this out as much as possible," says clinic administrator Jane Bovard. "They do everything they can to make us incur more expenses. I think their goal is to nickel away at us, to make it too expensive to provide services."

This points up the importance of having judges who respect human rights on all courts, not just the Supreme Court. (Do you know how many Democrats of the Gang of 14 who compromised with Republicans to avoid a fillibuster showdown are "pro-life"? Does that shed any light, perhaps, on why they felt someone like Janice Rogers Brown would be okay?)

This is what happens when women's reproductive rights are not considered "important shit." This is what happens when women are sold up the river in the name of "party unity." This is what happens when party politics trump morality.

Somehow, I missed this one back at the end of July: a strange, disturbing new law now in effect in Minnesota.

Pro-choicers, for the most part, didn't really make a big fuss about this, since it doesn't directly affect the availability of abortions, but it's mighty screwed up. The Unborn Child Pain Prevention Act was a "top legislative priority" for Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, a large, very influential anti-abortion group.

The law requires that women undergoing abortions after they're 20 weeks along be offered anesthesia for the fetus:

Directs that prior to performing an abortion on an unborn child who is of 20 weeks gestational age or more, the physician or the physician's agent shall inform the female if an anesthetic would eliminate or alleviate pain to the unborn child caused by the method of abortion.

Planned Parenthood of Minnesota (PPMN) did NOTHING to lobby in opposition to this bill before its passage, even though it very clearly lays the groundwork for more "fetal rights" legislation, which, for the most part, nullifies that silly little thing known as the right to choice.
Sarah Stoesz, pres./CEO of PPMN said she thought opposition should come from Minnesota OB/GYNs, represented by the Minnesota Medical Association, and didn't worry her little Planned Parenthood head about it.

Luckily, the Minnesota Medical Association successfully lobbied against the bill in order to remove the clause that would make not offering this anesthesia to the woman getting the abortion - oh, sorry, to the fetus which no medical research proves can feel pain to be dulled with anesthesia - a felony. Once the felony clause was removed from the legislation, the MMA dropped its opposition, and the bill easily passed.
Now, doctors only face "civil penalties," which means they could get their asses sued if they don't offer the anesthesia.

Today, Scribe's post about her experience back when she was but 13, seeking counsel from her minister, the only person she felt she could turn to:

I was thirteen when I finally got desperate enough to seek help after six years of sexual and physical abuse from two men living in my very religious and proper home. It took me a long time to work up the courage to break the Big Rule ( about keeping what happens at home private) but I finally I turned to my minister, the only hope I could see.

It was raining that day when I walked back home, after learning from this trusted man of God that it was probably my own fault, for acting seductively in from of those men. He had asked me lots of questions about how I dressed and acted around these two men. Yes, sometimes I did wear my nightie around the house in the evenings. Yes, sometimes I did sit on their laps. (But only when they asked me to!) Didn't I know I was way too big a girl to do that? He prayed with me for my forgiveness, and for guidance to help me remain chaste in mind and heart.

On the way home, I wished the rain was like some kind of acid that could just make me disappear.

How does a very intelligent, strong willed thirteen-year-old girl come to actually believe she is fully responsible for inviting the sexual and physical abuse that makes her life a living hell?

Start with putting her into a fundamentalist pseudo-Christian environment and feed her a steady diet of sin, guilt, shame and blame from day one. Teach her she was born sinful; that she was an afterthought in creation, made only to keep Adam from being too lonely: that she was made from one of his extra ribs, as if not worthy of God wasting any original material.

There is a lot more. And it seems quite clear. This is the very same message coming from so-called "social conservatives" today.

As I write this, Scribe's powerful story is also on the recommended lists at Booman and dKos.

Also making the recommended lists at both Booman and dKos this week were two bluntly powerful posts by another woman who's just joined Our Word. moiv's first post on Liberal Street Fighter reports on the incredible and overwhelming support of the Boulder community for Dr. Hern, who's been the target of zealots who believe the government should control women's bodies. Hern's words:

How is â€œOperation Save Americaâ€™s hatred and demonization of abortion doctors different from the Naziâ€™s persecution of Jews in the Germany of the mid-1930â€™s? How is it different from how white racists and the Ku Klux Klan treated black people in the South before the lynching began? How is it different from the Salem witch-hunts, and how is it different from the hysterical anti-communist McCarthyism of the 1950â€™s? How is it different from the Talibanâ€™s puritanical repression? It isnâ€™t.

If you think it's different, just give â€œOperation Save Americaâ€? more power. Their friends are already running the federal government. American women who want to have reproductive health and freedom and who want to live in the 21st century instead of going back to the 9th century have less to fear from the overturn of Roe vs.Wade by the Supreme Court than from â€œOperation Save America.â€?

A little more of this, and doctors just wonâ€™t do abortions. Would you?

Alarming stuff. moiv's second post picks up where the first left off, and shares with us the letter Dr. Hern sent to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean:

Dear Howard:

Congratulations on your election to the Chair of the Democratic National Committee. I appreciate the energy that you bring to this job.

Each time I see you on Meet The Press, I get more agitated with your use of anti-abortion propaganda terms to discuss the issue of abortion. You really have no excuse for this deplorable practice.

You are a physician, and you know something about this issue from a health perspective that most people donâ€™t know. You know very well that physicians like me who specialize in abortion services are not â€œpro-deathâ€? or â€œanti-life.â€? But that is exactly what you imply when you use the anti-abortion propaganda term â€œpro-lifeâ€? to describe people who are opposed to abortion. These are some of the same people who have assassinated physicians Bernard Slepian, David Gunn, and John Britton, who have assassinated other people working in abortion services, and who have attempted to assassinate yet other physicians and clinic workers.

In using this reflexively pejorative term as though it were neutral and descriptive, you have lost my support. To me it represents a thoughtlessness, carelessness and superficiality about this critical issue that is really inexcusable for a person in your position.

There's much more.

Small wonder these got support from the grassroots members at Booman and dKos.

But as a side note, I wonder at the conspicuous silence of the "alphas" of Daily Kos to these intimately personal and very powerful testaments to the undeniable importance of reproductive rights as an issue today. One wonders if they're holding their breath, waiting for the recommends to get lost in the wash. In contrast, the overwhelmingly postivie responses from the grassroots folks are rather encouraging.

But this very clearly illustrates the kinds of challenges people who support reproductive rights and women's equality face. When self-proclaimed "allies" refuse to engage in the rhetorical battle on your behalf, how are they helping you engage the self-professed enemies?

My fabulous governor (who I can be proud to say I never voted for) George Pataki has proved his douchebagness yet again.

He's promised to veto a new bill in the NY legislature that would guarantee EC's (morning-after pill's) over-the-counter availability.

His "logic" behind potential veto?

Kevin C. Quinn, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement that the governor's main objection was that the bill did not include provisions that would prevent minors from having access to the drug.

Because I hate it when those gonna-have-sex-anyway teenage girls can actually prevent those pregnancies that they obviously deserve for having sex in the first place. (please note the sarcasm)

Shitty thing is, Pataki's mostly been on the pro-choicer's side of the abortion debate. But now that the good ol' boy's planning on running for president in '08, he's gotta make good with the pro-lifers that make up so much of the disturbed Republican constituency.